


Suddenly acquainted

by Lilliburlero



Series: God send euery gentleman [1]
Category: Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: M/M, Oral Sex, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 18:25:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Broomhill is less entertaining than expected; nothing that Giles Marlow decides is the right thing to do could conceivably be the wrong thing to do.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: inexplicit description of sex between a 17-year-old and someone 6 or 7 years older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suddenly acquainted

Broomhill was not as entertaining as Patrick had cheerfully predicted to Nicola it might be. The head bloke had softened considerably on presentation of a flukey B in Maths, to the point where he was permitted to take History (though not English) at A-level. History was a doddle, Latin not as bad as he’d expected and German somewhat strenuous, but the place was rammed full of heavy dolts who’d been booted from their former establishments for pot-smoking and gambling. Against this drab background Patrick shone in class; he had enough wit and dash to deflect all but the most occasional and routine victimisation (and failing that, long arms and quicker than average reflexes), but there was no company, none at all.

In return for his uncomplaining if non-communicant presence at Sunday Mass in the nearest Catholic church (orange carpet, pews arranged in a horseshoe, sub-Henry Moore devotional sculpture) he was allowed on Wednesday mornings—free till lunchtime—to cycle to the large village of Cranden, eight miles away, where a Benedictine community celebrated the traditional rite in the regrettably modern, but at least tolerably chaste, chapel of a rather super 15th-century episcopal palace. Wednesdays would have been worth living for had it not been for the company of Baines, with his town-bred oiliness and penchant for interminable and revoltingly chummy commentaries on their mutual superiority to those ovinely content with the Mass of Paul VI.

One Wednesday in the middle of the second half of term, a suspicious rash, under investigation by Matron, deprived him of Baines. If it was the threatened shingles, Patrick promised himself delightedly, he would ride Blackleg to Cranden for the next few weeks, probably the rest of term, and immediately felt rather vile, having no small experience of invalidity.

But delight returned on the realisation that no Baines meant the cheery-looking coffeeshop on Cranden High Street became distinctly possible. After Mass, Patrick bolted his packed breakfast in the palace courtyard and repaired to enjoy a peaceful hour including _Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century_ and a couple of illicit cigarettes.

And walked, with the tremendous force of preoccupation, right into Giles Marlow.

Spluttered apologies and dustings-down over, it seemed ill-mannered not to offer the chap a coffee since their destination was so clearly the same, so tobacco and Elizabethan lyric were forgone in favour of the thing Patrick enjoyed least in the world: unavoidable, dutiful small talk with an acquaintance whom he liked (and rather admired) but feared did not return the sentiment in the least. 

‘Oh, yes, I think I do remember Nick saying you'd gone to school at last.' Patrick let this pass without demur, perceiving correctly that day school, to Giles's mind, just wasn't quite school. 'I’m at the ag. college on this potty little course. Piscine Identification Best Practice for the Keen Junior Officer, it amounts to. Four and a bit weeks to go. I allow myself a morning’s hooky every week—in fact, they seem to expect it, maximum attendance requirement eighty per centum—and come down here to loll and read the papers. You?’

Patrick gulped coffee. ‘Well, I’m sort of playing hooky too. I mean, I’m allowed out to go to Mass at the Towers. Usually there’s another bloke with me, but he’s poorly, so I thought I’d hardly be missed—no lessons before lunch. My lot don’t expect it, though. Attendance requirement one hundred of one hundred per centum.’

Giles laughed, a rich, unexpected sound. This wasn’t going too badly at all, Patrick thought, and after three-quarters of an hour of talk about—he didn’t remember what about—he realised he’d had a bloody good time. How extraordinary, he thought, to have come into the café desperate to make his excuses, and now to have to leave it with real regret. 

And then Giles said, casually, astonishingly, ‘If your pal is still laid up next week, drop in; I’ve a mind to be here, and I owe you a coffee and bun. More than once is a Tradition, isn’t it?’

Baines was sent home at the weekend, shingles confirmed. Patrick hesitated over Blackleg. It was one thing to leave him peacefully cropping in the lower field during Mass, too conspicuous altogether not to ride back to school immediately once it was over. One of the brothers would be bound to see, and make awkward inquiries. But if Giles didn’t show—and he couldn’t honestly believe he would—then he’d have denied himself the pleasure of the ride. On Tuesday night he slept in fits. Waking at the bell, far too late to saddle the nag, he dressed without washing, picked up his breakfast from the kitchen hatch (tinned salmon and salad cream, offer it up, he giggled, thinking of Bridie), signed out with a nod at the receptionist, who was scrunching some sort of white foam through her inflammable-looking hair, grabbed his bike from the shed, made a respectable 40 minutes of the ride (considering those odd flatland winds out of nowhere), suppressed yawns through Mass, took a tearing bite out of the sandwich and chucked the rest, absurdly mindful of the rule that _when in school uniform, food should not be eaten in the street_ and barged into the café, the utterly, he saw now, Giles-less café. He blinked hard and fast—don't be such a titanic child, Merrick—and ordered his customary, slightly pretentious, since he’d secretly prefer a spot of milk, black, two.

He was nearly finished it, and the consolatory accompanying cigarette, when Giles arrived, apologetic in the unruffled fashion that he shared with his sister Rowan and which Patrick much envied. He cast an amused look at the cigarette; Patrick stubbed hurriedly, then, remembering that Giles himself affected a pipe, wished he hadn't wasted the last drag or two. Giles sat down without ordering, and for a moment, propped his head in his hands. Then he looked up and said, ‘Since I can’t treat you now, not properly—would you like to come by my digs? It’s on your way, I think.’

Reflecting on it, Patrick would think he must have known what went on, and yet he was at the same time convinced he didn’t, really didn’t, until Giles pulled him close, cupped his chin in a callused palm and kissed him—comprehensively, entirely, were the words that seemed to fit.

So, for those next three Wednesdays, Patrick did not go to Mass. Instead, he cycled to a small estate north of Cranden, comprised of what appeared to him very mean houses indeed, propped his bike and himself in a snicket and waited until a maroon Mini containing Giles's landlady and her toddler left the driveway of 4, Bowling Green Road. The back door was on the latch, Giles was waiting for him in the single bed in the cold, inexplicably stuffy boxroom, and he spent the better part of two hours exploring that body, a broad-shouldered, strong-limbed, slender-waisted ideal, but furzy with curiously immature fair hair. The sensation of lazy, superior strength beneath him was blissful; he wanked to its shadow all week long, until he could have it again. (And, when he could not have it again, for painful months.) He delighted to the trained alacrity with which Giles, usually content to take pleasure as his due, just occasionally caught and pinned him. They barely talked, laying down in Patrick a lifelong preference for wordless sex. 

This, then, was mortal sin (and crime, though as he understood the matter, that was rather Giles's problem than his). For those glorious, unreal four weeks, Patrick felt oddly sanguine, as if he swallowed Giles’s own serene conviction that nothing Giles Marlow had decided was the right thing to do could conceivably be the wrong thing to do along with Giles’s spunk. Guilt, terrible, consuming, flailing guilt would come later, after Giles had left Cranden for Atlantic cod-spotting, after Patrick had made the most shy-making confession of his seventeen years, receiving a penance which startled him with its leniency, after he had made a firm purpose of amendment and, fascinated by the looks and mannerisms she shared with her brother, half-intentionally flattered and charmed Nicola Marlow into a hopeless entanglement.

**Author's Note:**

> This was at one point part of a WIP, which is not going to P any time soon, so I thought I'd detach a standalone story.
> 
> I have amalgamated two Cambridgeshire/Bedfordshire villages for convenience. I have not researched the likelihood of Giles' 'potty little course' (though it originates in a detail in _Run Away Home_ ), or his lodging arrangements. I hope I've made it sound reasonably convincing, and trust that I have Forest's imprimatur for mild implausibilities in the interests of character exposition.
> 
> The story takes place just after _Run Away Home_ , and on that novel's timeline, a considerable number of years before the passage of legislation to equalize the age of consent. Patrick is underage by the discriminatory law of the day, though not by today's British law. Thus, no official warning. Giles's age is never specified in canon: here I imagine him to be to be 23 or 24 to Patrick's 17.
> 
>  _Run Away Home_ was published in 1982; I'm assuming for my own convenience here that its events take place over the Christmas and New Year of 1979/80, and this story is set in autumn 1980. I would devour a story that packed Giles off to the Falklands; I may even write one, but this isn't it.
> 
> The series title is taken from the ballad The Three Ravens (Child 26): "God send euery gentleman, / Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman".


End file.
